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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Dirty and gritty

Our adventures in vegetables continue and guess what??? We found several tasty uses for eggplant! Last night we made pizza topped with turkey pepperoni (because I can't stand any other kind now after an unfortunate early pregnancy incident), assorted colorful peppers, heirloom tomato slices, cheese for the husband, and broiled slices of eggplant. I sliced them thinly, brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with grill seasoning and broiled their little hearts out and darned if they weren't quite good.

Then, tonight, we made tomato ratatouille. I found the recipe at aubergines.org, an amazing database of over 3000 eggplant recipes. But the truly revolutionary part is that they offer a search feature wherein you mark what other ingredients you have on hand and then they find a recipe containing all those ingredients. Why doesn't something like this exist for every vegetable, for crying out loud? It's stupendous! Anywho, we made this dish basically according to their recipe, with the addition of a lot more spices (there were way too many vegetables involved for the tiny amounts of spices called for), and it involved loads of eggplant, green pepper, tomatoes, zucchini, onions, garlic, and the aforementioned spices. Imagine the most vegetable-laden pasta sauce you've ever eaten. Now subtract the bulk of the tomato sauce, and you've got tomato ratatouille. The eggplant cooked down into innocuous mushroom-like consistency, which made it quite good. The husband also suggested that the dish would have benefitted from the addition of some actual meaty mushrooms, such as baby portabellos, and I concur, even though I'm not much of a mushroom fan.

This week we got eggplant (and it's gone already!), more kale (huzzah!), white and orange carrots, a gazillion types of tomatoes, including plum, cherry, roma, yellow, and ugly heirloom, huge onions, green peppers, and more, a lot more jalapenos (gosh darn it!). So look for tomato heavy recipes to follow! And any jalapeno suggestions are much appreciated.